1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a method and system for incremental multi-level change of text.
2. Description of Related Art
As the amount of information in our lives continues to grow, people want new and effective ways of finding and using it. “Sensemaking” is a process of gathering, understanding, and using information for a purpose. Sensemaking tasks often involve searching for relevant documents and then extracting and reformulating information for better understanding and utilization. Making a report is an example of a sensemaking task. A sensemaker performing this task has many interrelated and possibly interwoven subtasks. One way or another, a sensemaker gathers information, identifies and extracts portions of it, organizes these for efficient use, and ultimately incorporates the information in a work product with the required logical and rhetorical structure.
In difficult sensemaking tasks, sensemakers often employ intermediate representations to make the information available for repeated manipulation and visualization. Paper is often the medium of choice for external representations. For example, note cards may be used to keep short notes on a subject. The cards can be organized in groups, sorted, and progressively reorganized as more information is gathered.
At some phases of the work, sensemakers may spread their note cards out on a large table for ready access and overview. Small groups doing sensemaking, brainstorming, and design tasks often put note card-sized memos on large white boards or the like when organizing and sharing information.
For many sensemaking tasks, text is the main representation used to carry information. Although displays vary considerably in size—from watch and handheld displays, to desktop displays, to wall-sized displays, for example—there is always competition for space. When these tasks are performed on a computer, even high-resolution desktop displays can show only one or two pages of text. To put more textual information objects on a display of fixed size requires some way of reducing the required amount of space—at least temporarily—for each of the textual information objects.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,867,164 to Bornstein et al. discloses an interactive document summarization system that allows the user to control how much of the original document is included in the summary. In this system, the summary of the document may be narrowed down to only one sentence, which facilitates rapid review of documents.
In summarization, the goal of representation reduction is to identify the most salient information and to create more meaningful representations for text objects as they are given reduced space. The reduced representation for summarization is intended as a stand-in for the longer text and should be comprehensible, correct, salient, and representative. In other words, such summarization techniques require that text need carry a full meaning and need to be comprehensible or strictly correct. Therefore, the summarized information still occupies significant areas of the workspace.
There is another type of technique called semantic text zooming. In semantic text zooming, when text is visibly small it appears only as a title, and as the user zooms in, the text expands to include an abstract. Further zooming reveals first an outline with short text descriptions, then finally the full text. An example of semantic text zooming is disclosed by Perlin et al. (Perlin and Fox (1993). Pad: An Alternative Approach to the Computer Interface, Proceedings of 1993 ACM SIGGRAPH Conference, 57-64). However, such semantic text zooming requires pre-defined levels of abstraction.